Puslapio vaizdai
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bell, to emphasize how trivial a matter were a few scattered ebonies and beans, kicked half of them overboard. McCampbell liked children with a democratic fondness that was as remote from the Latin as his name.

But the half-breed children stopped their feeding long enough to chant in a merciless, derisive refrain, "Pu-teetah! Pu-teetah! Pu-te etah!" the ribald diminutive of the most ancient of professions. The child, young as it was, shrank into the folds of the yellow satin. It was the tone, the hostile jeer, that made the unmeaning word a whip of scorpions to the tender years. Here and there on the after deck a face sneered with an idle contempt -the unimaginative scorn of the sodden lucky for the outcast and the helpless.

The woman in the yellow dress shrugged her shoulders contemptuously, -one cannot fight an army of ants, -and stooped to refasten the gun in its garter holster; she caressed the child a brief moment and, as she straightened up, with the baby fingers still clinging to hers, the fading light of evening, mingling with the swaying lantern overhead, showed a face softened and human with helpless, unselfish suffering.

McCampbell was climbing back over the rope, buttoning in his waistband as he did so a little pink, pearl-handled revolver. Caramba!" he remarked, "Chiquitita está una diabla pintada!"

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"A painted devil," repeated one of the group absently. "Did you see that look just now? But what a chance for a kid! What show has it got!"

He had imagination, that man; yet he was a gambler, not of the old Mississippi River kind, or the modern prototype who works the big Atlantic steamers. He had run a house in Dawson, Nome, Goldfield, and Frisco, and now he was backer for a string of them. Incidentally he never played poker himself; the most he would do was a game of "koon-can" at

ten cents a corner.

The ship's bell began to chime forward, and was lost in the immediate bugle-call that brought the scattered passengers converging to the companion that led to the dining-hall. The captain listened indifferently as he heard of Chiquitita and the Chinaman; the boy surgeon, fresh from a Chilian medical school, chattered volubly

with the purser over contused, incised, and punctured wounds; and old Goya, a second Sancho Panza, who had a cacao plantation back of Coquimbo, gave a disconnected report on Chiquitita and the

coast rumors.

Presently on the cleared tables began the regular evening poker and "rocambor," while in the tiny smoking-room on the upper deck went on the continuation of the never-finished chess. From the after deck came the low thrumming of native-made guitars and the droning native songs, with simple reiterations that are rooted in the pre-Inca days. That evening there was no koon-can; instead, the koon-can player was located in one of the canvas deck chairs near the rope barrier, enticing a small, barefooted, blonde baby in a scandalously wispy night-dress to violate the sacred steerage regulations and join him. His scanty Spanish words, picked up on the voyage, reduced him to her level of childish vocabulary, and when she also found him responsive to her primitive English, understanding and confidence developed rapidly.

The woman in the yellow satin dress was dim in the shadows from the swaying lantern overhead. Presently she sauntered idly over to the rail, and then drifted over to the rope. She lighted a cigarette; in the flare of the match the man saw her eyes fixed upon him in scrutiny. Misunderstanding, his jaw hardened; self-conscious, his little playing became awkward; he placed the child upon the deck.

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"Catuca"-tenderness softened hard voice of the wearer of the yellow satin dress—“Catuca mia, it is time-"

Obediently the child let the big hand go, and pattered across the deck.

"Your kid?" asked the man.

Hard and uncertain, she read in his voice a sneer; moreover to travel deck steerage by compulsion of a reputation that ran up and down two thousand miles of coast breeds irritation.

"What's that to you?" she retorted truculently.

The man laughed contemptuously at the wanton insolence. Then he changed abruptly.

"I want to give the kid a chance," he said. "What will you sell her for?"

For answer the woman lifted the child gently in her arms, and strode off into the

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dim shadows of the lantern. tain high lights occasionally fell on the yellow satin dress, and presently there came the sound of sleepy baby gurglings. Very shortly they ceased, and the woman reappeared at at the rope. The man shrugged his shoulders.

"So you want to buy the kid, eh?" she sneered. "It is n't often I see a gringo down this way, so I don't mind talking. So 's to give it a chance!" She laughed scornfully. "Say, bo, before I sell that kid 'r give it up, somebody 'll cross my dead body, see?"

There was no doubt of the captain's statement that she spoke English better than Spanish; it was good New Yorkese. "Yes," repeated the man, "to give her a chance the chance you never had, or, if you did, you chucked."

"That kid 'll have its chance-education, clothes, money. I guess you know I don't travel deck because I 'm broke'."

"Yes, and after education, clothes, and money, what? What can you give it or keep it from?"

The woman seated herself on the rope. "It'll have a better chance than its mother gave it," she said coolly. "No, I ain't its mother; she was a fool girl that came down here with a gringo show. She's dead, and the kid would have been dead, too, or rollin' in the mud along of greaser 'r Cholo kids in one of these coast towns if it had n't been for me. And say, what that kid thinks of me—you saw, did n't you?" She broke off abruptly.

"Some day it'll know what to think. Let me give it a chance," said the man with grim appeal.

She heard and flinched; her voice stirred with a dwarfed and stunted passion; she was defending as with a blind, primal instinct her right to love-a squalid tragedy. What she said made no difference; it was a maudlin jumble, yet through it all ran an incoherent affection and the pitiful, defensive consciousness, from which she savagely shrank, that it tainted what it touched.

"Maybe it's pretty decent of you, and maybe it ain't-I don't care," she concluded; "but that kid 's mine, and I'd like to see the one that 'll get it except over my dead body. And that goes as it lays, see?" She rose, and disappeared in the shadows of the after deck.

"Poor little kid!" said the man, slowly.

He sat back in the canvas chair and lit a cigar. He sat thoughtfully for a long time. The archdeacon's grandson and the engineer finished the last chess for that night, and stepped out on deck. Seeing him aft, they dragged along chairs and seated themselves alongside. Presently the rocambor broke up, and a German drummer for a drummer for a commission house; old Goya, the cacao-planter; Palacios, the guano-shipper; and Padre Diego, an Ecuadorian refugee whose mild features and round head scarcely looked the value in silver that a revolutionary government had once put upon them, came up from below for the final evening smoke. The steady chunk and sleepy clamor of the engines rose monotonously from below; the after deck was quiet except for a few groups chattering in low tones as they passed round a bottle of vicious cañassa. The idea was still in the man's mind. He was the first to speak.

"Say, it's mighty tough being a kid like that-" he nodded his head toward the deck steerage-"without a chance, and then grow up."

"Rotten, I say-what," observed the Englishman, sympathetically.

"Ferry ligely," added the German, indifferently. He translated for the benefit of the others. They puffed on their Peruvian cheroots idly; it had not been worth translating.

"Yes," went on the man, idly, "the world 's pretty tough on a girl kid. Somehow a fellow can pull out some way, and pretty near any time, too, if he 's got it in him; but a girl kid! If she gets started wrong, it don't seem that there's any way back for them, even when they grow up and get brains. The brains don't help 'em none, either. Curious, ain't it? You'd think they would."

"If there is n't morals, there is n't brains," said the engineer, sententiously; "it takes brains to be moral."

"Say," returned the other, "forget it, friend. Did you ever hear of the Spanish prisoner game, or the 'sick engineer' proposition? Pretty slick brains, and not much morals, eh?" He straightened up briskly and chuckled reminiscently; he had been dangerously near preaching or sentiment, awkward things. "There 's another game that has n't much morals,

but considerable brains, and it was a woman worked it out, too.

"Of course it's a scandalous thing sitting here and telling you gentlemen about a crook, and a woman crook at that, but brains is brains, and maybe if any one of us had the luck to be the daughter of a fence, we'd have had a different set of lights to live up to. It makes a whole lot of difference whether you 're helping mother cook the Sunday dinner or helping her to slip monogrammed spoons into the melting-pot. She had just the ideas you might expect; but that 's beside the point. Well, anyway, after she 'd grown up, she and her side-partner had a run of bad luck. On that side of the world it's always a feast or a famine, and this was one of the famine times. There was n't enough in their bank-roll to lay out much of a plant, and it 's the same there as anywhere: it takes money to make money. Besides, you 've always got to have the ready for emergencies-a quick get-away even if there's no haul.

"It was the girl that furnished the brains; she 'd been doing a quiet spell of thinking, and finally she hit it. 'I've got it,' she says to Jim, her side-partner; 'I guess you can be fixed up so 's to pass for the bug-house,' she says. He looked a bit startled, but when she unfolded some more, it sure showed up as a neat operation. He had to be crazy, so she could take out papers committing him as dangerous, he being willing in a lucid moment, so as to make it easy. He was n't enough of an actor, so she had him sit down one night beside the rum demon and stay with it. Curious enough, he was n't a drinking man at all.

"You can guess how he looked the next morning. Chalk-faced 'n' hot-eyed, twitchy 'n' shaky generally, a nice dry parchment tongue, and all the symptoms of a joyous evening the night before. He was sure a ringer for a melancholic that was liable to break loose and commit anything. A lawyer drew up the commitment papers for her, the court gave a look at Jim, who nodded his head when they asked him if he was willing,-it was the only acting he had to do,-and the two sailed out with a fine set of genuine commitment papers that would stand any acid.

"Her side-partner took a Turkish bath and a dose of bromide to straighten up

while the girl was busy locating herself in one of those swell Madison Avenue boarding-houses, where it would n't be out of the way to have a private coupé with livery on the box to start out from for a drive. Then she hustled around to rent just that kind of a coupé. Finally she got what she wanted, the owner being in Europe, and the honest liveryman willing to turn an honest penny any old way, and Jim hiked out with her to one of those Broadway tailors and got an outfit of ready-made livery. She 'd insisted on having her own man on the box, being timid, as she explained to the stable-man. As a matter of fact, she was blinding the trail, so that later even the seventh son of a seventh son could n't pick it up, let alone just a plain headquarters man. The next morning the two got busy with the coupé.

"The private little coupé drew up outside of one of those solid brownstonefront houses in one of those solid brownstone streets. It looked like all the rest, except for bars half-way up the windows, and a bronze grating inside that you could see sometimes; it was one of those fancy private sanatoriums, very secretive and select. The girl disappeared inside,— she'd written, making the appointment for herself, and showed the commitment papers, and then got right down to business. Then came the song and dance.

"Her husband had become dangerous, -sometimes even she could not control him; he did n't know her, -and for her own life and her child's life she dared not wait, and she must place him in an institution. In a lucid interval he also had agreed to this. Of course she tried to control herself, but every now and then she broke down and cried a little. They had been so happy and so devoted, it was terrible. He had consented to commitment, and now it was gone from his mind; he would be violent. The doctor was very sympathetic; he suggested that they send for him; they were used to handling cases very tactfully. The girl was overcome at the thought. 'I could n't, oh, I could n't do that! I can bring him here, he will think it is only a social call, and then can he not be taken in charge so that I can slip away quickly?'

"'Certainly,' said the doctor. ‘All that will be necessary is for you to come to the

door, you need not even enter,—and as your husband steps inside, my assistants will take him in charge at once. There will be no scene, believe me.' He pressed a button and explained to two of his staff, big, husky chaps in white jackets. So it was arranged, and she was to drive up somewhere between five and five fifteen that afternoon.

"That same afternoon a swell little coupé pulled up in front of a big jewelry shop, and the girl flitted inside, while Jim waited on the box around the corner along with a lot of real coachmen, waiting for his call. Did I say the girl was goodlooking? Well, she was, peaches and cream, and hair always in a half-curling effect, and gushing over with the news that it was her birthday and that pa, pa was evidently wealthy; one of those fellows that don't care how much they spend as long as it 's in the family,-and the clerk took it all in. Pa had given her money for her birthday-fifteen thousand. It was lovely; so much better than last year, when it was a lot of bonds or something that it was an awful time getting the money for. She trailed along the show-cases, dropping bits of family history and enthusiasm until finally she got settled in one of those private booths with quite a bunch of plunder spread out in front of her on the little table. She decided on about fifteen thousand dollars' worth or so, and then she had covetous eyes on one other piece, a sunburst or something that she just must have, too. It would run it up to somewhere around twenty thousand. If pa were only there, she just knew she could coax him; but she had an idea. She looked at her watch; it was after half-past four. Pa would be home, and why not bring it up with the rest? And she just knew he 'd get her that, too. Of course they 'd have to send up, anyway, because she would n't think of carrying so much money with her, and her carriage was waiting outside, and their clerk could go right up with her and save time.

"Well, the clerk saw the manager, and he saw some one else, and in the end the clerk helped the girl into the coupé, and climbed in after, with the whole lot done up in a nice case, and they started uptown. Jim, on the box, headed for the sanatorium, and stopped all nice and se

date before it. The clerk helped the girl out; she was carrying the package, girllike and enthusiastic. Why not? There was n't anything to suspect in a lone girl and a peach at that, and they went up the steps together. A butler opened the door in advance, the girl turned for a second to call down to the coachman, and motioned the clerk to enter. He stepped in without a thought. And that was the last the girl ever saw of him.”

He had finished.

"By Jove! that was clever, I say, what!" remarked the Englishman. The engineer nodded.

"Some scheme that; fits together like a puzzle and perfectly automatic."

"Ah, you Americans!" The German gracefully complimented the race that produced such genius. But Goya, Palacios, and the padre were peacefully asleep.

Unnoticed in the night, the woman in the yellow satin dress had seated herself on the rope; she leaned forward tensely. "Jim," she called hoarsely. "Jim, oh, Jim!"

The Englishman and the engineer stiffened suddenly in their canvas chairs; the German misunderstood. "Get oudt!" he said contemptuously. The engineer prodded him with his elbow.

"Shut up!" he whispered.

The man looked over, startled.

"So you were the girl that turned that trick!" he said. "Curious, ain't it, what a small world it is in the long run? But I'm not Jim."

"Not Jim!" she retorted cynically. "Why, that game was only played once. You 've got it down pretty fine; how did you know? Turned nice and respectable, maybe."

"No," he went on, "I'm not Jim; I'm the chap that rode up-town in the coupé with you. It was four days before they 'd listen to me. The firm gave me a year's vacation with pay, and then fired me. I got a fair settlement from the sanatorium for false imprisonment. I thought I was down and out, but as a matter of fact it gave me my start. On the whole, you and Jim did me a pretty fair turn; but I did n't think so at the time." He held out his hands palms down, and moved ten supple fingers under the faint light from the lantern. “I guess you 've forgotten," he added.

"That 's right; I'd forgotten. It's a long time back now, ain't it?" she returned. "That 's right; Three-fingered Jim he was."

"I met Jim, and we never knew each other. Funny, was n't it?" he resumed. "Well, we sort of drifted together, and by and by ran a game,-it was better than prospecting, and that was the beginning. By and by I learned what I 've been telling. Jim got lost in a rush for a new camp somewhere-some misunderstanding, I never rightly knew what. He was always on the level with me. Funny how we come together, ain't it? It ain't much of a world, is it, it 's so little?"

For a moment there was silence; then the woman's voice broke in. It held a queer note, an odd, hard forlornness; this little link with the past that had brushed into view brought up the forgotten decades in a condensed vision.

"And I thought you was Jim-and Jim dead! It's a long time now, ain't it? Say, you don't know how thinking you was Jim gave me a turn-and those days. Billy McGlory's, Tom Gould's, and me a kid in Bleecker Street with old Mother Hackelbaum, and watching her jew over the swag o' nights. Nice chance for a girl, was n't it! Jim dead, nice and respectable, and me knocking up and down the coast deck steerage. Madre de Dios! I never had no chance." She broke off abruptly.

"No," said the man, swiftly as he shot a gesture toward the after deck, “and that kid will be saying the same some day, and there won't be anything but spiggoties to listen."

The woman straightened with a sudden movement.

"That kid-say, have n't I got no rights? Do you know what a baby is to a woman? No one 'll touch that kid except over" She paused. "Why, there is n't any one 'll do for that kid what I would; I'll give it its chance all right, all right.”

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No sentiment, no mush, no nothing. I just says the kid 's yours; it 's funny I don't feel queerer about it." The voice choked a little. "Maybe I've thought like you have, too; it must be that. I'll put it in your arms across the rope before I leave the boat to-morrow. Good night, bo."

She faded back into the shadows of the after deck. The little group separated for the night.

Late that night a disheveled figure crept irresolutely to the taffrail, and looked down on the boiling wake kicked up by the screw. Eight bells sounded like a chime from far forward, and the first officer, coming off watch, saw the figure slowly climb a coil of hawser and then, shuddering, stumble uncertainly back among the sleeping steerage and lie down once more by the tiny figure that sleepily nuzzled against the hardened throat and painted cheek with the great and aimless tenderness of baby love. Nor did the first officer hear the low sound that blended with the throbbings of the ship: it was a voice in Ramah.

AT daybreak the next morning the Mopucha swung at anchor off Coquimbo. Back of a dozen or so gay-roofed houses, clustered thatched huts, interspersed with an occasional touch of irrigated green, rose the desert hills, where here and there little lines of burro pack-trains straggled down to the coast. At six o'clock a shabby port-officer was pulled out. He climbed the gangway and nodded grandly to old Goya, the cacao-planter, who was ready to go ashore, and passed into the chart-room with the captain. McCampbell winked.

"He can't read," he said. "Maybe we have no quarantine, or, if so, I fix it."

The port-officer and the captain emerged. "Quarantine-twenty-four hours," said the latter. The port-officer had been warned by telegraph.

McCampbell took him in tow, and presently from below came the pop of a champagne cork, and presently another. Almost as though signaled, a couple of lanchas crawled alongside, while the winches clattered and banged as the cargo was worked out; from the main deck McCampbell and the port-officer looked amiably down. The woman in the yellow

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